Chapter 4

I asked calmly, “If there's anything we haven't established, please tell us.”

“I spent more than a decade searching for my son.”

The father's voice was earnest and full of feeling. Every word was clear.

“If there was even the slightest chance he was still alive—even the slightest—I would have kept looking. Until I died.”

Zhao Jun and I exchanged a glance.

Did that mean…

He had confirmed that his son, Wang Zhifeng, was dead?

“He's dead,” Wang Guohao continued, still calm. “Those three killed him together.”

We were even more bewildered.

He asked us to bring him his phone. He had handed over all his belongings before entering the room.

I knew there was something on it he wanted us to see.

I went to get it at once.

He unlocked the phone and found a video.

As soon as it began, we saw a familiar face.

Lin Zhijian.

This must have been what happened after he slipped out of his house the night before.

From the video and Wang Guohao's account, Lin had been tricked into leaving.

With nothing more than a note.

“The police want to hurt you. Don't trust them. Get to the hunting cabin and hide.”

Clearly, Lin had not trusted us completely.

He had deliberately evaded our surveillance, gone around the back of the hill, and made his way to the cabin.

It stood halfway up a steep mountainside east of the village. The men had built the little wooden hut after they “retired,” to use on their recreational hunting trips.

That was where the video had been filmed.

Lin Zhijian was tied to a chair. His face was contorted with pain. He wept and begged over and over for his life.

Wang Guohao ignored him.

He wanted only the truth about Wang Zhifeng.

It turned out that the boy had died eighteen years earlier.

One afternoon.

Zhang Delin, Chen Jianzhong, and Lin Zhijian had only just begun working with Kong Meilian. They urgently needed to complete their first abduction to prove they could supply children for her to sell.

Wang Zhifeng was nine. As it happened, he appeared near Zhang Delin's house.

The house was isolated, with no one else around for miles.

They did not know why the boy was there, but all three reached the same conclusion.

This was a chance they could not afford to miss.

A gift from heaven.

They acted without hesitation.

But they had badly underestimated a nine-year-old's strength.

At first, they thought they could simply overpower him.

Wang Zhifeng fought back fiercely.

He struggled so desperately that even the three of them could not hold him down properly.

What could they do when they could not restrain him?

Beat him.

It took the three men a great deal of effort to drag the boy into a bamboo grove. There, they beat him again and again.

Still, Wang Zhifeng tried to escape. Still, he screamed.

The men grew angry and panicked.

And, without meaning to…

They beat him to death.

Only when the boy stopped breathing did they realize how serious it was.

All they could do was dispose of the body in secret. They buried him in the bamboo grove.

They agreed that no one must ever know. Not even Kong Meilian.

Otherwise, she would never work with them again.

That was why Kong had known nothing about Wang Zhifeng.

She really had not been involved.

Afterward, the men made a rule.

Never take children that old again. Five or younger was best.

That was the truth behind Wang Zhifeng's disappearance.

Lin Zhijian and his companions had made Wang Guohao suffer far too much.

They had not only killed his son. They had left him searching for eighteen years, sustained by hope.

How twisted and desperate must he have felt when he learned the truth?

Anyone else might have lost all will to live.

No.

Perhaps the only thing keeping him alive was the determination to kill every last one of these traffickers.

And he had done it.

In the second half of the video, Lin was tortured horribly.

Wang Guohao did not kill him at once. He tormented him slowly, using an assortment of crude tools and farm implements.

Pliers to pull out teeth and fingernails.

Fishhooks that caught in the flesh, hurting more the harder he struggled.

A large, heavy rolling pin to crush the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

Then there were scissors and sickles. Those hardly needed explaining.

They were used later, because they did too much damage and drew blood immediately.

Once they came out, Lin died quickly.

Wang Guohao said the body was still in the hunting cabin.

There were many stray dogs and cats in the area. He told us to collect it quickly, before there was nothing left.

We sent officers at once.

They found a horrifying scene.

Lin's body was no longer intact. Animals had indeed eaten part of it.

With Wang Guohao's surrender and the discovery of Lin's body, the case seemed to be drawing to a close.

We even thought that would be the end of it.

But in fact…

It was not.

Yes.

There was more to the case.

And what followed was even more heartbreaking.

As we organized the case files, we found a number of suspicious points.

First, there was the claim that Lin had been lured out by a note saying, “The police want to hurt you,” and had voluntarily gone alone to the hunting cabin.

Something was wrong with that.

We had all seen how timid he was. He had even wanted to stay at our unit so we could protect him.

That showed he still had some trust in the police.

We did not think a single sentence like that would have been enough to make him risk going off alone.

Second, there was the delivery of the liquor.

If Wang Guohao had delivered it, even saying, “Kong Meilian asked me to bring this,” Chen Jianzhong might not have fallen for it.

However much hardship Wang had endured, a middle-aged man's appearance would not have changed beyond recognition.

Chen would surely have recognized something.

Especially since he was one of the men who had killed Wang's son.

How could he have forgotten the father's face?

Wang explained that he had concealed his appearance.

That only made us more certain something was wrong.

Ask yourself: if someone brought you food but refused to show their face, would you eat it?

Would you dare?

What really convinced us, though, was another part of Wang's statement.

He said he had bought paraquat pesticide, mixed it into the baijiu, and resealed the bottles.

Was there a problem with that?

Yes.

A very big one.

The poison in the liquor had not been paraquat pesticide at all.

It had been the paraquat ingredient itself—a chemical raw material.

Pure paraquat is colorless and odorless.

To prevent accidental ingestion, all commercially sold paraquat pesticides have an odorant added.

As a result, the pesticide has a very strong smell, like ammonia or urea.

Mixed with liquor, it would smell foul.

Who would drink it?

But the poisoned liquor in this case had no pesticide smell whatsoever.

That meant Wang Guohao had not made it.

He did not even know that the paraquat in it had been a chemical raw material, rather than the pesticide product.

We found something else as we organized the evidence.

Wang wore size 40 shoes.

The footprint outside Lin's window on the night he disappeared had been a size 42.

Everything pointed to one conclusion.

Besides Wang Guohao, there was another killer.

This person was highly intelligent. Otherwise, he could not have obtained the paraquat raw material, which was not sold on the open market.

He must have known the traffickers. Otherwise, he could not have persuaded Lin to leave our protection.

Perhaps he, too, was avenging Wang Zhifeng.

That would explain why Wang Guohao had been so quick to surrender.

He wanted to take all the blame himself, concealing and protecting the other killer.

His great revenge was complete. He had no reason left to live.

Then who…

Was this person?

But for a chance occurrence, we might never have identified the second killer.

His identity was far, far, far beyond anything we had imagined.

A few days after Wang surrendered, the investigation stalled again.

Sometimes, we even joked that perhaps having just one killer would be a good thing.

Then we heard that Zhang Delin had died.

After all those days struggling in his hospital bed, he was finally dead.

He had been tortured to death.

His mind had remained clear until the end, but his lungs were completely fibrotic. He could no longer breathe.

I was sent to represent our unit at his funeral, chiefly because we had a humanitarian condolence payment for the family.

And, as chance would have it…

The other killer was at the funeral too.

In the countryside, funerals are usually held in a mourning tent outside the family's old house.

Zhang Delin's body lay in the main room of his courtyard home.

In other words, the funeral was being held at his house.

Which brings us back to the beginning.

“Traffickers have neither ancestors nor descendants?”

That was only a curse ordinary people liked to wish on them.

In reality, their lives did not necessarily end that badly.

Zhang Delin had children.

A son and a daughter.

His son was twenty-five that year.

His daughter was only seven.

Quite an age gap.